It's possible to make new games for OpenMW, but right now, there are some things you'd still have to use the original Construction Set for, which would mean you'd be limited by Bethesda's licence and might not be able to, for example, sell your game. We aim to make that not a problem going forward.

There's the OpenMW Game Template which is the absolute bare bones of what you need to get the engine running and you can use it as the basis for a new game. There's also the OpenMW Example Suite, which is supposed to be a brand new game to show off what OpenMW can do, but it's not finished yet (and might never be if we keep adding new features that need demonstrating). If you just want to help make a game but don't really care what, help with that would probably be appreciated.

It would be very, very, very inconvenient to try to make a game from scratch in OpenMW right now, even considering that you wouldn't have to program in most of the game mechanics, for a lot of reasons. One reason is that OpenCS is very incomplete, another reason is that getting any custom assets into OpenMW is very annoying since it doesn't support any "good" model formats like glFT 2.0. I recommend using Godot or something similar.

what if I used other programs to make up for the engine's current shortcomings? I have a significant amount of software for game development [I'm a game development student] including Autodesk 3Ds Max, Meshroom, steam leadworks and Unity.